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Around 1340 AD began a series of wars between England and France that lasted over a century. It was made famous by Shakespeare in his inventive but glorious Saint Crispin’s day speech by Henry the fifth at the Battle of Agincourt:

“For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he never so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves cursed they were not here,
And hold their manhood’s cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.”

What is taught according to conventional theories is highly questionable.

You were taught that the Earth has two inner iron cores both separated by solid and liquid boundaries. Confidently this was around 5000 miles thick. The next adjoining layer, the mantle (we were told), is of solid silicates and a further 2000 miles in depth. Lastly, a thin outer crust is formed of silicates, both plastic and solid, some 50 miles thick. Plasticity of matter, as with the Sun, was the result of deep thermonuclear activity within the bowels of the Earth! All these plastic and solid boundaries were sharply defined. I suspect nothing could be further from the truth!

You were taught coal, oil, natural gas (methane) and the carbonaceous kerogens (all hydrocarbons) were sparsely layered in the upper parts of this thin mantle and were the result of the breakdown of surface dwelling fauna and flora fossils, both marine and land based, over billions of years. Certainly, these hydrocarbons were not a part of the original constituents of a formative Earth. I again suspect nothing could be further from the truth.

At the turn of the 18th century the ground beneath the city of Paris, France began to yield fossilized fragments and whole skeletons of animals which defied explanation by current theories. The fossilized animals, which were perplexing for both their scale and their type, were brought to professors of the prestigious universities and the Garden of Plants, but the bones remained in piles without identification with any known species. Meanwhile, the builders’ and the miners’ spades were daily unearthing the mysterious remains in French neighborhoods.

In the spring of 1817, in Paris, Henry and Marianne Layard gave birth to a son who was to make his mark on the world of Archaeology, then a relatively new discipline to the passions of mankind. It is pertinent to remind the reader that his birth was immediately following the turmoil of the Napoleonic wars. Both England and France, weary over the desolation of some thirty years of war, were to turn their national psyches to far more creative pursuits. Adventure and excitement were no longer to be gained on the battlefront and the era of great scientists, botanists and technologists were to change the human race dramatically. In Layard’s time personalities such as Darwin, Agassiz and Watt were typical of pinnacles that represented the new face of achievement in a world thirsty for knowledge in fresh arenas. The explosive growth of Archaeology from perhaps a souvenir gathering pastime to a respected science was driven by such pioneers as Layard, Botta, Champollion and the like. To contemplate why this growth occurred is beyond our present scope but one suspects that such endeavors can only flower in times of peace and for Layard and his contemporaries such a time was about to begin. Further to this, it is important, in our judgments, to remind the reader that Layard and his ilk were relative pioneers and should not be judged from our rigorous modern archaeological viewpoint. Rather, as Churchill is often quoted as urging, use the standards of the era in which that history unfolds.